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First Contact with the “God”
Lei • 27.Juni, 2008 @ 10:44 • Abgelegt unter: Allgemein
As R&D-Trainee, we seldom have the chance to directly interact with our “Parents of Food and Clothing” or “The God”, as the Chinese call customers. In our case, they are the automobile OEMs. So another highlight of my rotation in China was that I managed to get an idea of what our “god” is like.
We’ve gained quite a lot of attention due to the rarity of manual production at Bosch and correspondingly grown pretty experienced with audits and visits, including those from the president of our business unit and the Bosch Group board members. We also successfully passed several internal audits with high scores, thanks to the great team. However, it´s a totally different matter when the audit comes from the customer. “Customer is always right, so don´t argue confrontationally.” “Answer questions directly, but no more, no less”, we are being prepared by experienced managers before the customers came. They need to release the line before we can start serial production and deliver parts to them.
“Do you measure the pressing force of this machine?” asked the quality engineer from the customer team. I showed him the monthly measurement and the tolerance required. “How do you know whether the piece is good?” I pointed out the 100% visual control and followed up with an explanation of the failure catalogue when he pursued some of the technical details. “What is the magnification for the microscope?” he would not give up. A big drop of sweat came up on my forehead, honestly I don´t know and this has not been in my concern either as long as the microscope enables us to fulfill the task, which it does. But customer is customer, I asked around and an engineer got the answer from the machine book we kept on the line. “Good.” nodded the customer. After half of the line was audited, the atmosphere started to loosen up a bit, and the quality engineer became gradually more and more satisfied. He told me and other engineers in Chinese (he probably wouldn´t say it in English because the foreign expert in their team probably would not permit such blatant complimentsJ) that he is impressed by our quality control, which was much better comparing to our Chinese competitor. Our customer project manager exchanged a big smile and a joke with him “yes, that´s why you should give us more projects in the future.” The close relationship between customer and our customer team is one of the major success factors, which is perhaps not surprising given how much personal contacts count in China.
With the quick customer release, our SOP (Start of Production) officially started the following day, and we celebrated our first delivery one day later.
